Green Goods: A Biodiversity Impact Platform

Problem

People doing real conservation work — removing invasive species, planting native flora, rehabilitating degraded land — have no reliable way to document it in a format funders recognize. The science exists: you can measure invasive species removed per square meter, total biomass volume, carbon sequestered, disposal method. But without tooling built around that data, it stays trapped in volunteer notebooks or doesn't get recorded at all.

The result is a funding gap. Grant applications require verifiable impact. Without it, the best conservation operators lose to whoever writes better proposals, not whoever does better work.

Constraints

There was no brief. We originated Green Goods from scratch inside the GreenPill Dev Guild — a distributed network of regenerative developers, scientists, and community organizers, many based in Brazil. The people doing the work were not tech users. They shared devices, operated in low-bandwidth environments, and worked primarily in Brazilian Portuguese. The platform had to disappear — the technology couldn't be what they interacted with.

Origin

Green Goods grew out of a failure. At a GreenPill hackathon, our team — then called Camp Green — overscoped and underdelivered. We didn't win. But we had something more valuable than a prize: a live community of users who wanted to keep building.

What changed: instead of building everything at once, we stripped back to the essential loop — document a task, get it verified, earn recognition for it. That constraint shaped the product.

We went on to win two grants: Octant Epoch 5 ($20,000, awarded specifically for Green Goods) and an ENS DAO grant ($29,000). The platform is in active use today.

Design Process

We designed for environmental scientists, horticulturalists, and gardeners — people who understand the work deeply but aren't tech users. They share devices, operate in low-bandwidth conditions, work in Brazilian Portuguese. The platform had to meet them where they are.

The core design challenge was the impact data itself. What does meaningful measurement look like for a conservation task? We worked through this with the team: invasive species removal measured in square meters, volume of biomass removed, carbon sequestration estimated from that volume, disposal method (mulch, composting, removal off-site). Getting this right wasn't a UX question — it was a product definition question, and it's what made the platform fundable.

From there: wireframes built around a before/after photo workflow. Operator and gardener flows kept deliberately separate. Iteration focused on reducing cognitive load at the task completion step — the most critical moment in the loop. Later rounds added localization (Brazilian Portuguese), improved error handling, and unified visual patterns across both user types.

Solution

The design goal was to make blockchain infrastructure invisible. EAS attestations and hypercerts handle verification and reward — but users sign in with a phone number or email, never see a wallet, and pay no gas fees. The complexity is abstracted underneath.

The task flow is simple by design: view assigned task, read guidance, upload before photo, complete work, upload after photo, submit. Operators review and approve. Approved tasks generate an on-chain attestation and issue a hypercert badge to the gardener.

Impact data is collected at the task level — standardized fields for species removed, area covered, volume, method. This feeds directly into reports that operators can share with funders. The measurement infrastructure was the product, as much as the interface was.

Outcomes

• Octant Epoch 5 grant: $20,000 — awarded specifically to Green Goods
• ENS DAO grant: $29,000
• First users: scientists and gardeners in Brazil, active from early rollout
• Platform in active use; development ongoing